The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille: The Enforcement of Anti-Semitic Policies in Vichy France (review)

140 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 over them as in other parts of the former Poland, and Ukrainians supplied even more willing executioners than did Poles. The area was especially valuable for its oil, and served as an outlying settlement zone for Himmler and the SS, making for an SS and police monopoly only slightly affected by Goering's or Hans Frank's empire builders. Jewish slave-labor camps run by the SS to develop SS farms and industries replaced ghettos here. Nevertheless, the Holocaust proceeded here inexorably, not according to any blueprint, but due to the very nature ofthe unbureaucratic German command-state in the hands of fanatical antisemites. Dieter PoW is an eloquent writer. There are dozens ofplaces where he evokes the processes of slaughter in cool yet vivid terms. He is effective in describing the desperation with which Jews sought papers and identifying markings in order to survive yet another selection for death, sometimes assisted by some German officers, businessmen, or officials. He is able to show how some few Jews were able to resist and more (thousands) were able to hide out, aided usually by Polish friends. He is acid in his comments on the many cases where German courts let off some of the perpetrators he names. This is not a comfortable book, but it is a great one. Robert Koehl Department of History University of Wisconsin-Madison The Holocaust and the Jews ofMarseille: The Enforcement of Anti-Semitic Policies in Vichy France, by Donna F. Ryan. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. 307 pp. $39.95 (c); $17.95 (p). Several years ago, in a work entitled Vichy France and the Jews, Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton demonstrated convincingly the heavy responsibility ofFrance's wartime government, the Vichy regime, for discriminatory statutes, census-taking, roundups, and concentration of Jews in camps and forced residences in a manner that greatly facilitated the eventual deportation and slaughter by Nazi Germany ofmore than 70,000 French and foreign Jews. Donna Ryan shares this now generally accepted view of the crucial role played by Vichy officials in the Holocaust, but she adds to the picture a superb local portrait ofwhat actually happened to individual Jews in France during the Second World War, selecting the Mediterranean port city of Marseille for her investigation. Ironically, in tlle first years of the war Marseille was seen by many Jews as a haven through which they could pass to safety in the United States or other fmal destinations, but when Hitler began the implementation of the genocide of millions, Marseille Book Reviews 141 became instead a trap in which several thousand French and foreign Jews were caught. The destruction ofMarseille's Old Port in January 1943 and the thorough roundup of Jews that accompanied it serve as a poignant illustration of Ryan's argument that, whether or not they knew the fmal destination ofthe deportees, the assistance of French officials and police forces was critical to the Nazis' success. In this context Ryan demonstrates that the actions of Maurice Rodellec du Porzic, the police intendent at Marseille, and the enthusiasm ofthe Jewish Affairs police in the region were crucial to the application of antisemitic measures. In contrast to other regions of France where the population seems to have been somewhat more supportive of the Jews and where authorities exhibited less energy in their persecution, Marseille may represent a "worstcase scenario regarding the actions of French local officials" (p. 210). As Ryan acknowledges, other recent studies, such as Asher Cohen, Persecutions et sauvetages, Juijs et Franr;ais sous I'Occupation et sous Vichy, Renee Poznanski, Etre juifen France pendant la Second Guerre mondiale, and Susan Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, present a more positive evaluation of the French population to Vichy's antisemitism than she offers for Marseille, where the official bureaucracy and the police systematically and methodically "did their jobs" (p. 209), and those who objected or refused to do their duty were exceptionally rare. While Ryan discovered some evidence ofpopular disapproval ofthe deportations after the summer of 1942, she notes that the earlier discriminatory measures evoked virtually no response. One of the most original sections of...